Daily Archives: April 23, 2010

Today (April 24) is World Day for Animals in Laboratories, marked by a march through London. The day is the culmination of World Week for Animals in Laboratories. The event aims to raise awareness and to campaign against the use of animals in various laboratory tests. This post similarly hopes to raise awareness. But I also hope to promote the companies out there who do not conduct such tests.

When people think of animal testing, they think of mice and rats, but it doesn’t end there. It’s also rabbits, dogs and cats, and primates. The amount of suffering caused to animals (3 million in the UK alone in 2004, according to Home Office figures, and 27 million across Europe by BUAV’s estimates) is unimaginable.

The use of animals in tests for toiletries, cosmetics and household products is unnecessary. Is new shampoo or makeup really worth the pain, suffering and death of another living creature? No animal should die in agony in a cage; should experience severe pain (this is, in fact, against the law); taken from the wild; or transported large distances to be used in invasive tests. Unlike domestic pets, these animals are not protected by the Animal Welfare Act. They are treated like commodities.

The use of animals to test final products is now banned across the EU. But there are loopholes, including conducting tests outside of the EU, and the ingredients can still be tested. The only way to ensure that products are cruelty free is to see if they are BUAV approved (look for the ‘leaping bunny’ symbol) and to encourage other companies to follow suit.

The ‘Little Book of Cruelty Free’ provides a list of all the approved companies. They are not difficult to find on the high street either; M&S and Co-Op products, both toiletries and household items, are cruelty free; Superdrug own-brand and Body Shop stock a variety of beauty products. Honesty Cosmetics online sell from a wide range of small animal-kind companies – they have a wide and inspiring choice. Lush is also animal friendly.

I’ve been reading Mark Halperin and John Heilemann’s Race of a Lifetime, a book ostensibly about ‘how Barack Obama won the White House’, but in truth a quite in-depth look at each viable campaign first of the 2008 Democratic primaries (Obama, Clinton, Edwards) and then of the general (Obama and McCain). It’s not the same kind of book as Andrew Rawnsley’s recent Brit-centred political tome, The End of the Party (in this month’s coveted Words We Like spot), since it prioritises narrative over detail, which may itself be a useful metaphor. Halperin and Heilemann have no footnotes and no moments of great pause. They simply tell a story we haven’t heard before very well.

I wouldn’t say, then, that the book is instructive to read whilst we in the UK are having our own general election. But it is interesting, firstly because it emphasises how very personal the American political system is. The British system can be about individuals, too, of course – in every general election, some surprise local story sneaks up on the national media, in no small part because of the quite personal effects specific candidates can have in a given constituency. But the broad sweep of our system has traditionally been party political – all colours and rosettes, manifestos and messaging.

Except that this campaign has been different. It’s striking how little actually happened in the week between the first ever televised debate between the candidates for Prime Minister (even that term seems alien to the Commons system) and, er, the second ever televisied debate between the candidates for Prime Minister. The Tories, for instance, didn’t hold a single London press conference; Gordon Brown, as Jonathan Freedland has noted, is nowhere in particular to be seen. The polls came out, and everyone agonised about a sea change in British politics, but the whole affair seemed on hold until three men – out of thousands of parliamentary candidates across the country – had another slanging match on the telly.

So our politics just got personal. But Halperin and Heilemann make very clear how much travelling American presidential candidates do, and how visible they are. There is a tension in this new focus of the British system: we haven’t entirely made the change. We await the big debates, but in between we try and have a normal British campaign. Predictably, this results in a feeling of weird inertia – amateur politics going on between over-produced slices of network primetime. This isn’t how the American system, weened on the personal, operates. Not only that, but there are hundreds of constituencies across the UK which are electing hundreds of different representatives, some of whom do not – gasp! – belong to one of the three ‘main’ parties. There is some of this in the American system – Halperin and Heilemann detail how the Missouri Democratic candidate for the Senate, Claire McCaskill, worried that Hilary Clinton would damage her chances were they on the same ticket in November 2008 – but presidential candidates are also truly national figures who are ultimately performing for their own benefit. The ‘candidates for Prime Minister’ are quite different. The campaign feels like an unwieldy, unsatisfactory, hybrid.

Guess which other party had a St George dress-up photo op today.

Still, this may be the last campaign of its kind. All polls currently point to a hung parliament in which the most likely result would be a ruling coalition of Labour and the Liberal Democrats. This would ensure the introduction of some form of proportional representation – particularly if the party with the most seats also came third in the popular vote, a probable outcome once First Past The Post begins to struggle with a truly three party system. PR would surely lock the Tories out of power forever, and the party is therefore therefore desperate to halt the slide in their support (though right-wing tactics smack instead of a twitchy core vote strategy). But Cameron was in last night’s debate reduced to arguing that change was good, but to make sure it happened you needed to vote for a known quantity you could trust. And we all know how that tactic worked out over the pond.

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We live behind a door bearing a completely different number, but 71 were the digits which hung on an apartment we liked in Whinfell Forest, Cumbria. We still like the sound of them.

‘We’ are Anna French and Dan Hartland. The Story and the Truth is a sort of inadequate catch-all term for what goes on here: we, where 'we' tends to mean just Dan droning on to himself, write mostly about books, history, music, food and fashion. There's a lot of splitting hairs about science fiction, too. Stick around and see.

Words We Like

The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy

It's often difficult to come to lauded works of contemporary fiction when they've had chance to bed down, but not quite perhaps to have a 'classics' cover slapped on them. In the event, I admired this novel more than I loved it. It is gloriously written in almost balletic prose, and its structure is tricksy and expertly paced, even when it feels a little slow. The novel always reveals itself to you in time. On the other hand, it felt a little studied, and even - right down to that central incestuous relationship - a little pat, a little convenient. Perhaps that's a function of Roy's thematic reliance on coincidence, or perhaps it's something else, something totalising about the text which may or may not be linked to Roy's stubbornness over writing another novel in the years since. Hm.

Sounds We Like

Popular Problems, Leonard Cohen

You don't have any right to expect an album this good to come out of an octogenarian only making music again because his manager stole all his money. Nevertheless, Popular Problems is that which modern Bob Dylan albums aren't: a genuine entry in the story people tell about Cohen-the-songwriter. Where Dylan has transformed into something different-but-worthy, Cohen continues to write songs in the way, and of the quality, he always has: no craggy blues blow-outs here (instead, we have the incantatory 'Almost Like The Blues'). Here's the key question: is 'Samson in New Orleans' one of Cohen's best songs, right here in 2014? Maybe. 'Nuff said.